Sunday, July 10, 2011

Payment frequency
1) You will be paid once a month (for free) instead of every Friday.
2) You may opt to be paid weekly still but there will be a $1 fee deducted from your payment (see reasoning below).

Activity
4) If you have not logged into your account in 3 months, your inventory will automatically be set to "On Vacation" mode for all games.
5) If you have not logged into your account in 6 months, any active cards for sale will be deleted. Your history, SharkShares and Account will always remain active.
6) Any accumulated seller level promotions (Great White, Hammer Head, LandShark) will be lost after 6 months of inactivity and will need to be re-applied for.
7) If you are unreachable by email your account may be placed On Vacation.

Email warnings will go out before and during all of these events. All of the activity changes should have no affect on regular sellers.

------Reasonings

PayPal has recently increased their fees for us to pay you by 400%. As you know, CardShark pays all of the e-commerce fees related to your sales. In the past we have been able to also cover fees to send you weekly payments, but due to this large increase we can no longer absorb this cost.

If you wish to receive monthly payments, we will still absorb any fees, but if you prefer to continue to receive weekly payments, there will be a $1 fee deducted from your payment.

On this page you also now have the option to disable support for Delivery Confirmation if you do not wish to offer it.

Q: When in the month will I get paid? - Every Friday we will check if you have the weekly payments option selection. If yes, you will be paid all outstanding amounts and $1 will be deducted, if not, we will check if you have received a payment yet in this calendar month. If Not, you will receive a payment for all amounts pending.

When the next month rolls around, the same check is performed. Most likely people will see payments roll in on the first Friday of the month due to this setup, but it also has the added bonus of being able to get your money faster if you don't make regular sales. It also has the bonus of allowing you to get at your money at any time by simply checking the Weekly box and paying the $1. If you really need the money, just check the box and a payment will be made that Friday; You can always un-check it afterwards to go back to monthly free disbursements.

We have also set the minimum payment amount to be $20. This means that your account will accrue money due until $20 is reached before a payment is made. You will not be charged the $1 fee if a payment is not sent.

We are considering adding a "Credit" based system where you could spend any accrued money to purchase cards on CardShark. Let us know if anyone would find this useful.

Our reasoning for the vacation status changes and active inventory deletions should be obvious. They are to help us remind you of your account via email first and give you a chance to keep your inventory current. They will be used to detect bounced emails. They also serve to improve the overall quality of the cards listed by removing lapsed sellers or people that may have forgot they even have cards listed. This should benefit everyone by reducing cancellations, removing unreachable sellers, bringing active prices closer to true market and encouraging regular account maintenance by sellers.

One last thing: we have also increased SharkShares for buyers leaving feedback to 5 from 1. This will hopefully encourage more feedback to be left.

These policy changes are effective now but may take several weeks before full implementation.

If you have any comments, please email us or post it here for community input.